My day alongside Murdoch's pie-chucker

Turns out I spent most of today unknowingly queueing alongside the idiotic attention seeker anarchist who threw a shaving foam custard pie at Rupert Murdoch in this afternoon's Parliamentary Select Committee hearing.

He calls himself Johnnie Marbles, though he's clearly lost his. His real name is something rather posher--Jonathan May-Bowles. It seems he's both an anarchist and a peddler of small-time attention-seeking art and comedy stunts which reveal all too little talent at either. He was one of The Guardian's Top Ten Plinthers rated for their act on the Fourth Plinth "One and Other" project of Antony Gormley. His performance consisted of reading out texts of their secrets sent him by the audience. What on earth must the not so Top Plinthers have been like? Great Art, oh, yes.....

Funnily enough,The Guardian's write up on him this evening doesn't mention his being on their list of Top Plinthers. How odd. But it does tell us that he's a founder member of UKUncut, which is issuing vigorous denials that they had any foreknowledge of his stunt, although they seem to know he pulled another stunt incident in a BHS store and got into the Fortnum and Mason invasion.

I first learnt what great political theatre Select Committees can be years ago-- I used to go and hear Sir Keith Joseph being done over by the Education Select Committee when he was Minister for Education in the seventies. And I recently went to one of the best in the new Parliament-- Hague, Liam Fox, Oliver Letwin, Andrew WhatisisName i/c Overseas Aid being questioned by the Foreign Affairs SC, where we learnt that the new Defence Strategy consists of tiny forces barely able to cope with their existing commitments, so our overseas influence is now to be built by lots of overseas trips making friends and informal alliances with groups and countries we used to ignore or keep at arm's length. Like the Arab League and Bahrein.

So I decided that today's hearing by the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, calling Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, might just be worth an enormously long wait, hopefully on the nice green benches outside the Committee Room in Portcullis House, whilst I got on with some paperwork or reading. I got there at around 9:25, was pointed to a queue outside Portcullis House of about thirty people and found myself behind four rather alternativey looking people-two youngish couples- with a tall very smartly dressed ginger-headed man, neat trench coat and leather satchel, who seemed to be in some sort of organizational role in relation to them.

I got into small talk with them and said I'd go and see if it was possible to sit and queue inside. "If I'm not back in twenty minutes, you'll know you can queue inside-- and will you keep my place?". And Mr Ginger talked about needing to ensure that he designated one of them to queue for him. Well, it didn't work-- they weren't letting anyone queue inside (which they usually do), but soon enough the amiable Mr Ginger turned up, tried to reinforce my request to include himself, but we ended going back to the queue, where he briefed his friends and disappeared.

So in front of me through the four hour wait on the pavement outside Portcullis House were Jonathan May-Bowles (though I didn't know his or any of their names till after the event, his girl friend (that's her in the picture above, a stereotypical anarchist-looking guy, with a Tolstoyan hair and beard-- all very amiable. We exchanged bits of chit chat from time to time. Mr Ginger appeared some hours later and waved aimiably from the other side of the press queue, but he didn't rejoin us.

They let just over 30 of us into the Select Committee Hearing room, all seated on the wooden bench at the back. The security was the usual letting us into Portcullis House. Bags put through an airport type scanner. Photos taken and an electronic arch to go through. And until May-Bowles pulled his stunt, I'd never have guessed.

Reading the online reports and the tweets after we got turned out of the hearing, they don't really convey how very poorly Rupert Murdoch performed. Long, long pauses almost every time he was asked a question. Sometimes had no idea what to say. More than once I had the strong impression he'd forgotten the sentence he'd started saying. Banging the table as he spoke was weirdly out of synch with the relatively anodyne things he was saying. He often said he didn't remember, and I didn't get the impression from his tone of voice that he was covering up. I remembered his television interview clip last week when they asked him what his priority was now he'd arrived in England to sort the News International mess. "This one", he said, putting his arm round Rebekah Brooks' shoulders. It seems to me quite likely that he couldn't remember her name at that moment. James Murdoch repeatedly butted in to try to answer for him, but was batted away by the Committee members.

If I were a News Corp shareholder (a laughable concept, but still..) I'd be calling for Rupert Murdoch to have to undergo a brain scan and in depth neurological report. Seriously. I've been around dementia and mental impairment sufferers long enough to recognise the very early stages of permanent cognitive decline when I see them. I'm gobsmacked to think of him playing such a key role in a global corporation. Tellingly, he did mention that his underlings often tell him he's talking rubbish when he tries to give them ideas.

And James Murdoch? He came across like a typical organizational suit, full of the usual obfuscation and evasiveness I'm regularly encountering in my current dealings with NHS PCT bureaucrats. Paul Waugh tweeted one of his prize lines of organizational gobbledygook:

There are thresholds of materiality where something has to be moved upstream.

This was one of the few times when Rupert outstripped his son, in this case by translating the verbiage into plain English:

Anything seen as a crisis comes to me.

So this pair are supposed to be the Evil Empire, controlling the politicians and institutions of the UK? On the basis of this performance, utterly laughable. One of the few worthwhile and revealing answers from Murdoch Senior was when he responded to a rolling dramatic question about how come he'd entered 10 Downing Street via the back door when he visited Cameron after the election: "Because I was asked to. I did what I was told." And in passing he managed to list the many times he'd visited Blair and Brown and talked about Brown's and his kids playing together. And pointed out that it was people like Blair, Brown and Cameron who travelled across continents to see him at their request, not his.

But I never got to see the end of the questioning, including Louise Mensch's questions, because that's when Mr Attention Seeker Prat Jonathan May-Bowles threw his pie stunt. I must say it was startling (but not surprising) to see Wendi Deng, Murdoch's grim-looking wife, springing furiously into action, socking him and covering him with his own shaving foam. I looked back at May-Bowles' girl friend. She was sitting quietly watching, keeping her head down, so to speak. A girl, supposedly his ex girl friend, has tweeted to say she's dumped him because of the attack. All I can say is the very pleasant and affectionate girl friend he spent the day with didn't look at all shocked or surprised. She just seemed to want to avoid drawing attention to herself. The friendly Mr Tolstoyan Beard was already being held. I told the policeman steering us out that the girlfriend had been with May-Bowles all day, and they pulled her back. I also tried to tell one policeman after another that I'd spent the day sitting alongside them, that there was a group of four of them, and another, smartly dressed man who appeared to have been involved with them and organizing them, but they weren't interested. Just wanted us all out.

I told Nick Robinson. I told Nick Davies. I told as many of the other journos I could see what I knew. You should tell the police, they said. But they don't want to know, I said. I went back and had another try. No dice. The police just wanted the public out of the area. I went into the room where the journos where being allowed to wait to re-enter the meeting-- the public were excluded after the attack.

And there was Mr Ginger, who hadn't been in the Select Committee Hearing. I pointed him out to a couple of the journos I told the story to. Too busy. And then I went home.

Thanks to Mr Attention Seeking Prat May-Bowles, it'll probably mean fewer chances for the public to get into hearings like today's. And he's even managed to get sympathy for Rupert Murdoch, who may deserve some concerned focus on his health and fitness, but not for becoming a victim of an attack.

But what sort of security is it that lets a man into one of the most open buildings of Parliament with shaving foam in his bag? That could have been caustic soda, paint stripper, poison, acid....The security apparatus is showy but totally ineffective because the contents of bags aren't searched properly. These people didn't get in through having insider help, they just queued to get in, same as I did. And I've no idea what exactly was Mr Ginger's role, but this was clearly no spontaneous attack

And as for the police turning away witnesses after an attack....Met Police, there's an email at the top of my blog if you want to contact me.

Comments

As I observed watching it on TV, I vividly recalled Reagan during the Iran/Contra hearings, where he conveniently avoided being backed into a position where he would have been exposed as a liar, by responded like someone suffering from dementia- he just kept repeating blankly "I don't remember" to every awkward question. But then of course, he did develop dementia, so it may well be Reagan was not feigning. Similarly with Murdoch: I thought, either this is a man who has pitifully lost all control of his organisation, or is a man feigning to be such. But as you say, it was quite painful to watch and in the end I didn't think he could be feigning- he really seemed to be groping and struggling.

And what useless journos and police, not even to follow up on your leads!

Amie, I hadn't thought of Reagan, but yes, what you have to say about his performance in the Iran/Contra hearings seems very pertinent.

One real clincher about Rupert Murdoch was his lack of response to the attack yesterday-- and to the astounding performance of his wife. He did cower when the attacker struck, but after that seemed almost frozen. He hardly looked around him, including at his wife-- and it was in great contrast to everyone else amongst his family and supporters, who were all agitatedly moving and gesturing. He seemed as if he didn't really comprehend what had happened.

John, I do think Paul Waugh gave a very fair and accurate account of the hearing--and if I'd found him immediately after the event, perhaps he would have done more than the other journos...But basically, it's the police and Parliament security whose job it was to make sure that witnesses' details were taken, and they really did fall down on that part of the job, as well as the way the security was done on entry.

OAP attacked by unemployed over educated upper class champagne socialist.
A true numpty he's single handedly made people sympathise with a ruthless media tycoon.
Time for the witch hunt to either become a lynch mob or quit.
I don't see any sign of them quitting.

You mean reported on your strangely out-of-proportion belief in some sort of conspiracy of four (four!?!) people and a smart-dressed man coordingating them all! Quick - someone call MI5, I be you he's from the Comintern.

Six decades of accumulated opinions, it says here; but, going by this post, I think these are six decades of accumulated anal retention. I think it must take some doing to get pious and condemnatory about a pie attack on a billionaire media mogul implicated in serious wrongdoing forced to apologise profusely and make dubious evasive responses to a parliamentary committee. The notion that a pie attack, a non-violent semi-slapstick gesture which has a long history, will serve to muster sympathy for the mogul only suggests that the author lives in her own rather rarified world. Given the long stream of serious allegations against Murdoch's corporation, it will take a lot more than pie attacks, even if they are errant, to distract the attention. More wishful thinking on the author's part - plus that anal retention, of course.

The woman in the grey suit has been identified in Paul Waugh's post (link above) as Linda Nova, the legal representative of NewsCorp.

Alasdair, you're a Labour Party activist, so you would say that, wouldn't you? Jonathan May-Bowles was thought to be fine as a Labour Party member till yesterday, despite being a self-declared anarchist with a blog proclaiming "because capitalism won't smash itself". Doesn't that go just a little beyond Labour as a "broad church"?

He claimed not to have involved UKUncut in his stunt, yet within minutes, his Twitter "confession" tweet, from a Twitter account with a then tiny following had been retweeted to the point of trending nationally, with all of them recycling his Twitter name but not his real name and his founding UKUncut role. That doesn't happen quite so quickly without the involvement of large Twitter follower networks.

If anything's out of proportion, it's your response of exaggerating my account of what I witnessed yesterday.

"But what sort of security is it that lets a man into one of the most open buildings of Parliament with shaving foam in his bag?"

Well, this is the difference between the author's authoritarian mindset and those of us who have a more libertarian outlook. This question is easily answered. You don't get many pie attacks in China, Russia, Cuba and other countries that are more authoritarian and where police will no doubt confiscate virtually any substance under the sun or not allow any member of the public near the vaunted elite (plus higher degrees of brainwashing, and no nasty anarchists). Perhaps the author would like to live in country with a 24 hour security lock down. However, to us with a more liberal mindset, the odd harmless pie attack on a billionaire is the price we pay for living in a more liberal democracy. Unlike the author, I would rather have it that way.

Oh don't be ridiculous - clearly he's a knob. And clearly his behaviour did nothing for those of us who'd rather not see Murdoch own half the newspapers in the country and a big slice of broadcasting.

But if you were actually abreast of what Labour members really thought, you'd know that most of them (us) think just that - he's a knob, and his actions have hardly helped them (us).

As for this mysterious 'large Twitter follower network' (organised by whom? Maybe the smartly dressed man was busy on his smartphone calling the massed ranks of twitter-revolution to arms, smashing capitalism with a retweet), you clearly don't understand how Twitter works - especially not in the middle of such a globally watched and talked about media event.

Maybe we should have an inquiry about how dirty anarchists have managed so thoroughly to infiltrate the police, parliamentary security, journalists and shaving foam makers in such numbers.

"Jonathan May-Bowles was thought to be fine as a Labour Party member till yesterday, despite being a self-declared anarchist with a blog proclaiming "because capitalism won't smash itself". Doesn't that go just a little beyond Labour as a "broad church"?"

Interesting McCarthyite attitude to politics. The author is suggesting that political parties should vet their members thorough internet checks, scanning emails, interviews etc., to make sure they always follow particular political lines. Irrespective of "anarchism" - a broad and flexible notion - one can see that Jonathan May-Bowles espoused pretty straight forward left wing views with an interest in activism (all legal and proper, even if you disagree with those views). Unlike the author and her narrow, illiberal, and sectarian view of politics, I don't think these were grounds to have barred him from the membership of ANY political party prior to this incident. As regards the incident itself, we shall have to see how things pan out. However, the notion that a pie thrower, even a convicted one, should be permanently banned from membership of ANY political party seems somewhat absurd.

Impossible to tell whether the security people were actually subcontractors, as they were all in House of Commons uniform. And there's a named House of Commons security person officially responsible for determining the nature of the security checks made.

Getting a tweet trending from one low-follower tweeter always depends on exponential take up. But it only gets to that point thanks to an initial core of tweeters who are followers or regular readers of the original tweeter, some of whom will be read and retweeted or echoed by others who have massive follower counts. That initial core will be most significant here.

Readers can make up their own mind as to whether or not I'm au fait with Labour members' thinking and how Twitter works.

May-Bowles may or may not be a "knob", but I don't think his actions make a great deal of difference either way. Most people will be pretty phlegmatic, and the incident provides a bit of water cooler gossip. Over the years, there have been various pie attacks on the rich, powerful and pompous. Given what Murdoch is implicated in, he seems an obvious target for such a political stunt.

Alimentary, my dear Watson. The evidence seems to suggest that he didn't have the stomach for the assault himself so may have despatched the self-important delusionary fool who did the job for him. Oh, and Watson, something of a lacuna in your normal standards of reporting. I referred to his smart dress, specifically a trench coat and a leather satchel. I cannot attest to whether the jacket beneath the trench coat was a suitable companion to his immaculate trousers.

You asked the right question here:"But what sort of security is it that lets a man into one of the most open buildings of Parliament with shaving foam in his bag? That could have been caustic soda, paint stripper, poison, acid..."
Mr.-Marbles- is a shill hired by Murdoch & Co to create a little PR stunt before the questioning gets rough. Just look at the way he was dressed-in a shabby looking plaid shirt with a ridiculous looking haircut(in his comedy videos he looks much different with a shaved head). I can't help but be reminded of Alan Colmes or Alex Jones when I was viewing the footage of Mr.Marbles being taken away,in that Mr.Marbles comes off as repulsive and unstable-just the way Faux News likes to portray any protester or activist.
If you forget about the name and the public image the guy emanated, the security failing to stop him is very suspicious in this day and age of invasive body searches. Add to that the fact there is only one bad camera angle being shared currently.

OMG are you people for real??? A pie is the face of Rupert Murdoch Oh boo hoo... I cannot understand why the whole of Scotland Yard didn't swoop down there immediately and seal the place off. Well done you for being such a galant citizen and getting down all these details. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of Alan Bond, multi millionaire fellow Australian who lost billions then developed dementia. Funnily enough he recovered once his jail term was finished. Seriously.

At least one of the above comments reeks of Murdoch-employed PR psoren is there a way for Nikki Finke to check when this happens? I'd certainly check who employs the first comment writer.The BBC is conservative with its editorialising. Fox news is intentionally misleading. And the BBC is not an aggressive corporation it's bound by principles that newscorp simply doesn't have at all. Which is why they employ people to write to magazines and papers and online forums such as this.

Bejesus, not to be outdone by our 90 days vote, the Australian grnvoement is proposing 12 months!104.4 Terms of control order(d) specify the period during which the order is to be in force, which must not end more than 12 months after the day on which the order is made;

I feel kind of bad to say this, because I do aiapecrpte the newspapers and the Duluth News Tribune, but I honestly can't see that I would do this. Whenever I run into a story that I want to read in the archives of newspaper sites, I just can't seem to buy the story. I just tell myself I really don't NEED to see it, and I move on. Not every blogger gets his news from traditional media. I get information for my blog from various sources, including people I know, friends, contacts, etc. I think blogs will become even more powerful if this happens, especially credible blogs that fact-check and report sources.

Why would anyone be stpiud enough to do this? The Hibbing Daily Tribune currently charges for online content which is bull! Who knows how much traffic has decreased on hibbingmn.com due to charging for online content. Give me a break. Hibbing Daily Tribune doesn't pay carriers what they are worth. No wonder they can't find carriers to deliver their paper and rely on mail carriers to deliver the paper. People want their paper in the morning, not at 4:00 in the afternoon.